After having setup a RAID 10 array with Ubuntu 10.04, almost 2 years has gone by. It is amazing how solid the software RAID in Ubuntu was implemented. I have had no problem with Ubuntu and the same installation from September 2010 works very well in the Acer h340 Home Server hardware. The only thing that failed was one of the drives in the Sans Digital TowerRAID external enclosure. The 1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drive failed at the age of 4 years. Luckily the drive was covered by a 5-year warranty.

After some testing of the defective drive using SeaTool in Windows, a drive defective report was generated and an RMA was accepted by Seagate. A week later, my replacement drive arrived. Unlike Western Digital, Seagate sent me a “Certified Repaired HDD”, not a new drive. I did have a “Certified Repaired HDD” failed only after 1 month of usage. But your mileage might vary…. Also to get an advanced replacement drive from Seagate, I had to pay US$9.99 to have the “Certified Repaired HDD” shipped to me before I send the defective drive back. As for the warranty service from Western Digital, they would ship me a brand new drive to replace a reported defective drive without charging me anything. This definitely will affect my purchase choices from these two manufacturers since the pricing of their new drives are very similar these days.

I replaced the dead drive with the replacement, reattached the array to Ubuntu and rebooted.

From Disk Utility, I partitioned the drive using GUID partition table, then formatted it using an ext4 file system.

Upon firing up the terminal app, I raised my privilege to super user using the “su” command. Once I have root level access, I ran the following command:

Hey Howie, from what I heard Drobo is great and it has crossed my mind to get one as well. If you get one, make sure you don’t fill it up all the way. I heard Drobo needs some “working space” to expand and replicate files.

Sorry work has taken a lot of my personal time and hope I will be able to get back to blogging from now :)